


Impressions

by Nym



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Ficlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-28 19:06:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6341530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nym/pseuds/Nym
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neal doesn't know what to make of Storybrooke, of his long-lost father, or of Lacey.  Requested by Tumblr user <strong><a href="http://samoyedjack.tumblr.com/">samoyedjack</a></strong>.</p><p>
  <em>He asks Henry who's who and winds up wondering if, some day, his own story will get packaged into a children's book or a blockbuster movie. He figures he's probably more avant-garde, that if this world turns Baelfire into a story then it'll be one told in a niche market. After all, they've all heard of Rumpelstiltskin. He's travelled this world, running from or running to, and that story is everywhere, and if the name is lost than he can see his old man's tricks behind another name, another mask. They never mention a son, so he always figured that was how his father wanted it. That he forgot, turned the page. Closed the book and moved on.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impressions

**Author's Note:**

> **None of my fanfiction may be reposted or otherwise shared elsewhere, including translations and audio recordings, unless you have my written consent. Using my occasional original ideas/characters in your own fanfic, to make your own words or art or whatever, is fine with me.**

Things can change pretty fast in life. Neal's always known that, ever since he was a kid, but Storybrooke seems like it has the whole business condensed out of real life. You can walk down Main Street and feel the turning of a page or the place where one story runs out and a new one gets started. His papa is at the centre of all of it, but he's also set apart. Elusive. Neal asks questions, smiling, reassuring anyone he meets that this apple fell plenty far from the tree. He asks Henry who's who and winds up wondering if, some day, his own story will get packaged into a children's book or a blockbuster movie. He figures he's probably more avant-garde, that if this world turns Baelfire into a story then it'll be one told in a niche market. After all, they've all heard of Rumpelstiltskin. He's travelled this world, running from or running to, and that story is everywhere, and if the name is lost than he can see his old man's tricks behind another name, another mask. They never mention a son, so he always figured that was how his father wanted it. That he forgot, turned the page. Closed the book and moved on.

Except he didn't. Mostly he struggles to believe anything that comes out of his father's mouth, but Emma's told him, and Henry. Mister Gold did all of this just to find his son. He never stopped looking. He never gave up.

Seems like he doesn't give up on a woman either, which is a newsflash to Neal. He can't remember a single time the old man glanced at a woman, and his memories of his own mother are muddy and faint, buried under the stories told by Killian Jones, Peter Pan and Rumpelstiltskin himself. Easier to assume that none of them are telling the truth about his mother's fate, his mother's life. Sometimes, when he isn't trying, Neal can picture her face. Dark hair. Big eyes. Worry and little lines that laughter didn't put on her. He wonders if his father ever spoke to his mother the way he spoke to that woman on the phone when he thought he was dying, to Belle.

He didn't ask about her. It's news to Papa that they have nothing to say to one another once they finish discussing the past, but it's no surprise to Neal. He's here for Henry, for his own lost boy, and he isn't ready to move past the still point that he's reached with his father. He isn't ready for forgiveness, but god, he wasn't ready for the love he feels either. The pain of it going too many ways. Emma who brought love alive in him when he thought it'd been crushed for good. Henry who doesn't even have to earn it but comes packaged with the guilt of the years they didn't have. Hell, even _Hook_ , who had a kind of honour in Neverland, a thin veneer over his seething hate, a kind word or deed for his dead lover's child, but doesn't have it any more. And Rumpelstiltskin, Mister Gold, the reason they're all here in this town made of stories. That hurts more than Neal can bear.

Even though he doesn't want to talk, he does watch. Whatever's going on with Gold's girlfriend, nobody can explain it to him. Emma's dad tried, glad for something to talk about other than his princess being left pregnant in a jail cell. Belle was nice, he says, the last person you'd expect to fall for the Dark One, then Hook shot her and she lost her memories falling over the town's magical boundary. And now she's...

She's not the same woman his papa spoke to on the phone, pouring out his love and regret. Neal's damn sure of that. It's another mask he's seeing, the mask of the curse that brought everyone here from their world. It used to be that everyone here was masked. Now it's just her, and Papa's glued to her side. She's a reddish brunette, petite, her accent Australian and her attitude... casual. This town curse makes Belle into Lacey, into everything she wasn't, and Neal knows his father too well to believe what he sees everyone else is thinking—that Lacey makes a fool of Mister Gold. That he's willing, desperate enough, to trade a true love for someone who merely shares Belle's face.

Never that. Papa is a special kind of fool, his own kind, but not that kind. If Lacey is digging for gold then Papa is only too happy to give it to her. If Lacey tries to drink him under the table then she'll find the Dark One standing steady on his feet long after they call her an ambulance. If Lacey likes a man who wears his power without shame or subtlety then she'll never meet anyone she likes better than Mister Gold.

Lacey wears a lot of blue and black, shows a lot of skin and drinks anything that's not in someone else's hand. Beyond that nobody knows anything about her. Nobody's met her, what with Mister Gold monopolising her since the moment she was born into Storybrooke, a fully grown other-self and out of step with the rest of them. All anyone seems to be able to tell him is that she isn't Belle, not in any way Belle, but he can see that nobody really knew Belle either. She was the mystery woman who somehow, god knows how, loved the Dark One and saw something better in him.

Neal's always known that there's something better in him. He knew the man before, after all. Gentle hands, kind voice, safety. His papa. It's all impressions to him now, not so much memories as pictures that come wrapped in a sucker-punch of feeling. He knows there were days, plenty of days, that he ate when Papa didn't. He can't remember one of them, but all of them, homogenised by time into one certainty. They played games together with toys made from sticks and stones and fallen feathers. Papa was so good with his hands, so clever. Baelfire learned to card wool on his father's knee, laughing together over what should've been a chore for a tiny boy. He learned to spin the same way, though he didn't have the clever making-hands of his father but the thinking-hands of his mother, the ability to catch a likeness with a stick of charcoal on a blank surface. A bird. A scene. A face. And though he needed, so desperately needed a son who could use his hands to turn a profit, Papa would sit and marvel over his little drawings, and speak a little of mother, and sometimes bring out the precious paper where she used to draw her dreams of a better place. Baelfire was older before they could afford paper for him to draw on, and by then his father was a different man.

Neal blinks to clear his vision, to refocus on what's here and now. His own son, his own boy, caught at that moment between easy childhood and being too grown up to play with abandon. That's the one good thing Baelfire learned in Neverland, all those frozen years a prisoner of a whimsical child-god; you're never too old to play with the other boys. He and Henry have wooden swords in their hands, they have imaginary steeds. Henry hangs on his every mention of the Enchanted Forest, so he tries to think of more things to say about it. They storm the play castle and rescue a toddler in red who's climbed too high, then they fall laughing together onto the grass and don't need to say anything at all. Laughter is enough.

Did Papa ever feel _this_ for him? This crazy, unheeding love all wrapped in joy? Did he ever? Does he now? Because Neal would die for this son he just met. And Neal would kill for him. Anything, anything at all for a boy he barely knows and has no right to claim a hold over.

While Henry fetches them two sodas, Neal glimpses Mister Gold getting out of his car on the street beyond the trees. Lacey is on his arm, bundled up in a black jacket that keeps her top half warm while her legs go bare above spiked heels. They lean close to speak, a smiling, sly conspiracy of two, and then they're out of sight.

That's all he has now of his father. Glimpses past and present. Impressions. Moments.

Henry says that Gold has been kind to him before, but now he thinks he did something to upset him and make him mad. It happened in New York, and Henry glimpsed the Dark One. Felt the fear. And that... oh, man. That raises the hairs on the back of Neal's neck and makes some primal thing inside him scream for blood. He learned that in Neverland too. There's a time to be a savage, to listen to your blood.

His blood is Henry now. Will always be Rumpelstiltskin. Is a woman loved by him and Killian Jones both, who either left her son or was taken away from him; who was either murdered by Hook or murdered by the Dark One, depending on who's talking. He's going to have to know the answer to that, to figure out which of the two men is the greater danger to his son. But he doesn't want to know what happened to his mother. Deep inside him, the little boy is afraid to know. He wants to share that with Henry but he doesn't. It's a story for later.

Whatever else you can say about Lacey, she's keeping Mister Gold busy. _There's_ a place Neal's mind doesn't want to go, that maybe no son's mind wants to go when it comes to his father, but you can tell that Papa and Lacey are... yeah, busy. Busy is distracted, busy is good. Busy is distance and not asking Neal for forgiveness that he isn't ready to offer. Busy is away from Henry and Emma.

It isn't just Henry that keeps him here in Storybrooke. Neal only knows it for sure as he carts Henry home, a dead weight over his shoulder, worn out by fresh air and small town adventure. His son. He feels the pull of the blood, of family. Of responsibility.

He has to stay, but let there be Lacey, let him see how that story plays out. Let him see who Papa, Rumpelstiltskin, the Dark One has become these days, and what he'll do in the name of true love. And what he's capable of.


End file.
